denverpilot
Tied Down
Yay. Finally got to do a flight for no other reason at all other than just going somewhere. Ha. No checkrides looming ... on and off for a year. LOL.
Asked Karen if she wanted a burrito at KPUB for lunch. Busted out the airplane keys and looked at weather. Ahhh... snow squalls and a storm coming in around 4 but we’ll be back just before then. Let’s go.
Plan B was... dunno. Land somewhere south and hitch a ride. Whatever. I’m not instrument current.
So we wandered down. Winds started to pick up ahead of the front(s) but Karen has the standard 20 year passenger butt of steel so when I thought it had gotten bumpy enough a new student would be really sick, she just looked over and said, “It’s not that bad.” Heh. Nice.
PUB was a gusty partial crosswind pushing about 20 when we got there. Did a short field and landed at like 20 MPH in the STOL bird. Fun. Taxiied in. Told Flower to toss 20 gallons in. And hit the restaurant.
It was deserted. Sad. Nobody wants to fly in gusty winds. Oh well. Also noticed the new “decor” under the new ownership. Pretty barren. Missed all the model airplanes from the past owners but oh well.
Karen had a burrito smothered in green chili, I tried the “open face” steak sandwich, which actually just arrived on a bun. Waitress was nice and food was nothing better or worse than the old owner days.
Went to pay for the fuel and wind was whipping but straight down the runway for the most part. Gusting 30. Oh well. Knew that was coming. Time to get outta Dodge.
Another short field from A-9 (with that much headwind component there really wasn’t much reason to taxi full length!) and outta there.
11,500 over the top of KCOS going down and 10,500 on the way back. Played with the Garmin both ways pretty much continuously. The more I play, the more I like it. Not sure I want to leave auto-zoom on though. It really doesn’t pick the most useful level of zoom for pretty much, well, anything.
iPad integration with the Flightstream was flawless other than one thing. The newish “Visual” approaches in the GTN don’t push over to the iPad. Interesting. Seems like it could push a waypoint way out from the runway and build a magenta line in the iPad that way that you could go “intercept” but it doesn’t. No biggie. I wasn’t really surprised.
Virga and snow squalls along the Palmer Divide. Yup. Makes sense. Picked the clearest hole that was a number of miles wide and went under. Lots of room to turn around and see-through virga off to the west with the mountains and everything in view. Just knew it’s a butt kicker under the Virga.
Continuous light chop with an occasional moderate bounce. Karen doesn’t even say anything these days unless we find Moderate. Ha. We both go “oof” when a moderate bump rocks the world for a second. Other than that she doesn’t even notice it anymore. I’m more sensitive to it than she is, just because I’m looking around to see if I can get out from under the cloud or whatever is causing the bumps.
But today is just bumpy. Oh well.
Had to descend inside my lovely VFR corridor over Castle Rock just to make darn sure I had VFR cloud clearances there, since it was clear from both listening and watching on the ADS-B that there were three jets being vectored above us in the clouds for the approach into APA. Could also see we’d be between two of them perfectly in the sequence which is nice SA to have. Virga was lowest there and then we could see the airport on north.
Denver Approach was doing their best trying to vector people around the snowstorm to the east with radar. Their view of its location (and on the iPad via NEXRAD) was just wrong. Hahah. But they tried. We all just told ‘em what we actually needed and they accommodated. Love those folks. They tried to point me right into the snow squall at one point... “Ahhh, we see the precip and we’d actually like to come left ten and that’ll work.”
Centennial as we checked in had a jet report a 20 knot loss and issued the LLWS warnings and then asked us if we all copied the PIREP. “Yeah makes sense, it’s squirrelly out here, 79M.”
They also had a mini squall line east of the airport with all virga out of it and that messed with the wind. They gave up trying to update the ATIS and just told everyone checking on that winds were constantly changing and LLWS and announced whatever the meter said for everyone in the conga line on a one mile final.
In the airplane it wasn’t bad. Just changes of ten knots up and down for two miles at the same power setting and pitch. LOL. Normal spring Colorado crud.
Made a longer than usual full flap just letting it land when the wind slacked off and took the high speed off of 35R and taxied in.
Lovely flight really. Bumps notwithstanding. And lunch was the usual PUB “okay”. Karen liked going flying since she hasn’t been up much in the last year or so. Good times.
It’s overcast now and getting ready to snow overnight. Won’t be long before this wintery stuff is thunderstorms instead!
No photos. Just fun.
Asked Karen if she wanted a burrito at KPUB for lunch. Busted out the airplane keys and looked at weather. Ahhh... snow squalls and a storm coming in around 4 but we’ll be back just before then. Let’s go.
Plan B was... dunno. Land somewhere south and hitch a ride. Whatever. I’m not instrument current.
So we wandered down. Winds started to pick up ahead of the front(s) but Karen has the standard 20 year passenger butt of steel so when I thought it had gotten bumpy enough a new student would be really sick, she just looked over and said, “It’s not that bad.” Heh. Nice.
PUB was a gusty partial crosswind pushing about 20 when we got there. Did a short field and landed at like 20 MPH in the STOL bird. Fun. Taxiied in. Told Flower to toss 20 gallons in. And hit the restaurant.
It was deserted. Sad. Nobody wants to fly in gusty winds. Oh well. Also noticed the new “decor” under the new ownership. Pretty barren. Missed all the model airplanes from the past owners but oh well.
Karen had a burrito smothered in green chili, I tried the “open face” steak sandwich, which actually just arrived on a bun. Waitress was nice and food was nothing better or worse than the old owner days.
Went to pay for the fuel and wind was whipping but straight down the runway for the most part. Gusting 30. Oh well. Knew that was coming. Time to get outta Dodge.
Another short field from A-9 (with that much headwind component there really wasn’t much reason to taxi full length!) and outta there.
11,500 over the top of KCOS going down and 10,500 on the way back. Played with the Garmin both ways pretty much continuously. The more I play, the more I like it. Not sure I want to leave auto-zoom on though. It really doesn’t pick the most useful level of zoom for pretty much, well, anything.
iPad integration with the Flightstream was flawless other than one thing. The newish “Visual” approaches in the GTN don’t push over to the iPad. Interesting. Seems like it could push a waypoint way out from the runway and build a magenta line in the iPad that way that you could go “intercept” but it doesn’t. No biggie. I wasn’t really surprised.
Virga and snow squalls along the Palmer Divide. Yup. Makes sense. Picked the clearest hole that was a number of miles wide and went under. Lots of room to turn around and see-through virga off to the west with the mountains and everything in view. Just knew it’s a butt kicker under the Virga.
Continuous light chop with an occasional moderate bounce. Karen doesn’t even say anything these days unless we find Moderate. Ha. We both go “oof” when a moderate bump rocks the world for a second. Other than that she doesn’t even notice it anymore. I’m more sensitive to it than she is, just because I’m looking around to see if I can get out from under the cloud or whatever is causing the bumps.
But today is just bumpy. Oh well.
Had to descend inside my lovely VFR corridor over Castle Rock just to make darn sure I had VFR cloud clearances there, since it was clear from both listening and watching on the ADS-B that there were three jets being vectored above us in the clouds for the approach into APA. Could also see we’d be between two of them perfectly in the sequence which is nice SA to have. Virga was lowest there and then we could see the airport on north.
Denver Approach was doing their best trying to vector people around the snowstorm to the east with radar. Their view of its location (and on the iPad via NEXRAD) was just wrong. Hahah. But they tried. We all just told ‘em what we actually needed and they accommodated. Love those folks. They tried to point me right into the snow squall at one point... “Ahhh, we see the precip and we’d actually like to come left ten and that’ll work.”
Centennial as we checked in had a jet report a 20 knot loss and issued the LLWS warnings and then asked us if we all copied the PIREP. “Yeah makes sense, it’s squirrelly out here, 79M.”
They also had a mini squall line east of the airport with all virga out of it and that messed with the wind. They gave up trying to update the ATIS and just told everyone checking on that winds were constantly changing and LLWS and announced whatever the meter said for everyone in the conga line on a one mile final.
In the airplane it wasn’t bad. Just changes of ten knots up and down for two miles at the same power setting and pitch. LOL. Normal spring Colorado crud.
Made a longer than usual full flap just letting it land when the wind slacked off and took the high speed off of 35R and taxied in.
Lovely flight really. Bumps notwithstanding. And lunch was the usual PUB “okay”. Karen liked going flying since she hasn’t been up much in the last year or so. Good times.
It’s overcast now and getting ready to snow overnight. Won’t be long before this wintery stuff is thunderstorms instead!
No photos. Just fun.
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Funny how both landings were nice with no pressure on, too. Haha. 
